Sets of named entities are used heavily at commercial search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Acquiring sets of entities typically consists of combining semi-supervised expansion algorithms with manual cleaning of the resulting expanded sets. In this paper, we study the effects of different seed sets in a state-of-the-art semi-supervised expansion system and show a tremendous variation in expansion performance depending on the choice of seeds. We further show that human editors, in general, provide very bad seed sets, which perform well-below the average random seed set. We identify three factors of seed set composition, namely prototypicality, ambiguity and coverage, and we investigate their effects on expansion performance. Finally, we propose various automatic systems for improving editor-generated seed sets, which seek to remove ambiguous and other error-prone seed instances. An extensive experimental analysis shows that expansion quality, measured in R-precision, can be improved on average by a maximum of 46% by removing the right seeds from a seed set. Our automatic methods outperform the human editors seed sets and on average improve expansion performance by up to 34% over the original seed sets.

Swarm intelligence is about design of distributed algorithms which use simple rules and indirect communication, but result in intelligent emergent behaviour. Geographical Information Systems are systems which are able to analyse, manipulate and store vast amounts of spatial data. In this paper we study the use of swarm intelligence based algorithms for use in GIS and this is demonstrated with an example of the problem of site selection, also called as location allocation. An agent algorithm inspired from the nest building behaviour of natural termites is discussed and some simulation results are also provided.